La Casa Lobo, La Casa Lobo

The idea of La Casa Lobo was first born as an extension of our work in short films. Since we made our first shorts together – Lucia and Luis – we had the idea of doing a feature. At the beginning we thought about making a series of shorts, a triptych called Lucia, Luis and the Wolf. The third short film, never made, was El Lobo. Lucia and Luis were shorts that took place, each one, in a room. El Lobo, we thought, should take place in a whole house, therefore be a feature film. With time El Lobo became completely independent of Lucia and Luis, at least in narrative terms. The film is born from an idea that we have put into practice in different short films that is to carry out a role playing game as directors. In the case of La Casa Lobo we are playing to be an animation production company in Colonia Dignidad. We heard of a large film archive existing in the colony. They would produce their own films in order to present to the outside world an idealized version of the life of the colony. We imagined that among all those films, there might be an animation film. What would happen if Paul Schaefer had been a kind of Walt Disney? What story would he have told?

We decided to make the film entirely with stop-motion technique. Within that technique we wanted to explore all the possibilities we could imagine. We get bored quickly and to stay interested we try always new things. We try to keep in mind that everything is a sculpture: furniture, architecture and also the characters, everything can be cut, destroyed, melted and reconstructed again as something new. We use drawings and painting on the walls, figures of waste and masking tape, soft stocking figures that look like old stop motion dolls, cut outs of cardboard, painting on glass, plasticine and surely other techniques that I must be forgetting.

We are visual artists and filmmakers, with one foot in each of these worlds. When we started making the film we realized that we could hardly concentrate on the production if we continued making exhibitions. The problem was that precisely at that moment, we were receiving many invitations to make shows in different places. We had the idea that we would accept the invitations only if the exhibition venues accepted us as resident artists, that is, if they allowed us to use the museums and galleries as our studio. We thought that nobody would accept, but the opposite happened. People saw our exhibitions and we started receiving more invi- tations. We made a journey through many museums and galleries in Chile, but also in Argentina, Mexico, Holland and Germany. It was also a way to obtain funding not only from the funds for the cinema, but also from the funds for the visual arts. Also for a long time, we saved paying the rent of a studio. It was a great experience in many ways, we like to do pieces that exhibit their process, that show the bones. We like, for example, to make animations that are completely transparent regarding their technical resources. Doing these exhibitions was a way of doing that too.

We think stop motion animation as the documentation of material transformation. It’s a documentation where the real characters doing these processes are hidden between frame and frame. We wanted this film to be a long sculptural process. We wanted it to be a single material and energetic current, like a dream, where your mother suddenly becomes your best friend or a dog. The situations and the characters change but the materials are the same. We thought that a single shot was the best way to do this. We wanted the film to work like a Goldberg machine, and a single shot is the only way to record that.

Interview by Vincent Poli